Two friends at King's Lynn railway station

Two friends at King's Lynn railway station. There's a lot of things wrong with this shot, but there's also one thing right: Friendship. :)

The instructional part of this is that the Kiev 88, especially with the Mir-26b 45mm f/3.5, is a big, beautiful camera that attracts a lot of attention. I've been stopped a few times by random strangers who just want to look at the camera, and this time I was stopped by a group of youths at a station who asked for some pictures of them. Don't worry, they were actually very nice. :) This was my favourite photo of the lot.

Other than that, if you're shooting at f/3.5 on a medium format camera, even with a wide-angle lens, you'll find your depth of field is horrendously limited, which is made all the worse by their dim focusing screens (which makes it much harder to get perfect focus). I explain this to some degree in my article on defocus blur; this is part of the reason I shoot my Kiev from a tripod at at least f/8 most of the time. Of course, some of the softness comes from shooting a crappy Soviet lens wide-open.

Finally, it illustrates be extra careful about how you load your film in a Kiev 88. Medium format 120 film has no sprockets to keep your film straight in the camera like 35mm does. The darkened bottom of the frame comes from the film slipping in the magazine.

Tech trivia: Kiev 88, Mir-26b 45mm f/3.5 wide-open, probably 1/60 shutter speed, Kodak BW400CN (now discontinued in 120 format)

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(from the gallery People)